Preserving Milk in Mexican History: Sweets versus Cheese
And addendum to my post on cheese in Mexican history. A classic way of preserving milk in Mexico (as in India) was to boil it down until the milk sugars became so concentrated and the water content so low that it did not spoil. We don’t have any figures. But given the attention paid to milk sweets in colonial Mexican cookbooks, it seems likely that much of what milk production there was went into sweets not into cheese.
And if you’re a bit confused about milk sweets, think of cajeta (dulce de leche) which is a fairly liquid form. Boil the milk down further and you will get fudgy solids.
Good one Rachel. We call this Khova in India and yes sweets are made out of it.
I’m familiar with dulce de leche, but it never occurred to me that it was a preservation technique as cheese is. Very interesting!
Yes, it’s technique that often gets overlooked because of the European (and European-inspired) predominance of liquid milk/cheese as the main ways of dealing with milk. It has a spotty world distribution, mainly India and Latin America. I’m still puzzling over that.